This is a very well-written piece that asks a lot of interesting questions. I probably won't be able to go through all of it right now, but I wanted to respond to a few initial points, and hopefully, my response is at least half as coherent as your original post.
I agree that the metric for 'progress' is mostly amorphic, but if we accept the simplified version of what's been described as 19th-century progress, I think we're mostly doing a good job. Some of what has been called mistakes here seem to be generally successful to me.
That te...
I think perhaps, as humans, we want morality and happiness to overlap when this is rarely the case. Self-sacrifice is definitely a limited resource, but if most people believed it to be a moral duty, the human race would likely be better off. The problem with the self-sacrificial strategy is the problem of defection in any game.
If we could convince a sufficient amount of people to sacrifice their personal resources and time, then the average cost of self-sacrifice could go down enough that more people would be willing to do it and we would all be better o...
I generally agree but also find that people also accuse people of nitpicking or excessive nuance when trying to defend ideas that feel true but are logically weak.
I find the critical distinction between rigor and nitpicking to be whether the detail being argued about is critical to the foundation of any of an argument's premises.